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SISE Group Project – Recce & Tutorial Meeting 2

In our previous meeting we discussed our ideas for the SISE group project, we favoured basing our sense of place project on a city tower block. Previous Meeting. During the week we tried to arrange to meetup and recci some locations and this proved difficult for people to commit to.

We finally managed to arrange a couple of hours this morning and we met up at the tower blocks in Redcliffe Bristol. We immediately discovered a problem accessing the site and had to resort to gathering material around the grounds of the tower blocks. We got some interesting images and could visualise how the project might work if we were able to get access to the flats.

In our tutorial we discussed our problems and discussed how we should try and gain access to the site and engage with residents who might be happy and interested to help out in the project. I think it’s fair to say that there was a struggle getting motivated, especially as it was proving difficult to meet up as a group and we discussed this briefly.

Along with discussing the tower block ideas we also discussed my continued interest in doing a recce of Avonmouth motorway bridge and myself and David agreed to do a recci in the afternoon just to vary our options if we still encountered issues with access and motivation. During the tutorial Kathy kindly loaned me one of her home made contact mics along with a waterproof mic because I was interested in capturing obscure environmental sounds, we took this mic along to the bridge with us.

When we visited the bridge it immediately felt like it would be an ideal place for our project, there was a vast array of audio and image opportunities and little restriction. It was surreal to see a housing estate split up so abruptly by a huge structure and left me wondering what it must be like to live in this locations. There was an OAP crossing a pedestrian crossing that seemed to lead nowhere and all around the light was blocked out by giant supports and scaffolding clad beams. Under the bridge there was nothing but gravel and rocks and immediately next to it were houses with gardens, trees and even birds and it felt like a huge contrast in a matter of a few metres and this was something that really interested me.

We captured a number of images to show to the rest of the group and also headed up the bridge and fixed the contact mic to the floor to experiment with sound options. The sounds I gathered of the cars crossing a metal join on the bridge really inspired me and I could see how it could be used in a project.

We fed back our material to the group via facebook and are currently awaiting peoples thoughts on where we should base our final project. Although I agree with the concept of the tower block location I think based on our current speed of progress we wouldn’t have time to contact people and set up a situation where we could complete the project to a good standard. Using the bridge we could visit at any time and not necessarily in a group and combine our material to create a pretty good standard of work.